By Magelight
by nuuut
Summary: He said nothing for a long moment as his brain caught up with the strangeness of the situation, his eyes moving slowly over her dripping hair, mud-splattered cloak, and the darkness of the street through the shadowy window behind them.


**Challenge Summary:** Maerad takes a midnight walk through Innail and finds Cadvan doing the same thing

**Requirements:**

-The way Maerad discovers Cadvan is by tripping and falling on top of him

-They can't kiss, but they come very, _very_ close

-Cadvan has to pin Maerad up against a wall

-It has to end with Cadvan saying, "That was quite the performance."

**~/~**

.

Maerad stepped slowly, slowly toward the door of Malgorn and Silvia's Bardhouse, placing her weight carefully and moving her arms before her for guidance against the dark. Her eyes were stretched wide, but the moon was hidden behind wind-whipped clouds and shed no light. There were no lamps lit for travelers at this late hour and she finally felt the doorknob against her numbed fingers with profound gratitude. She turned it slowly– _slowly_– but the hinges had not been oiled, and as she pushed, the door squealed loudly and gratingly.

She froze.

A dog barked a few houses away and someone called angrily at it. Then a stiff wind briefly snatched her hair from her neck, causing her to jump, but no one stood near her, or in sight. Holding her breath, she pushed the door further, her jaw locked against the excruciating noise. Then it was wide enough open and she was slipping through, and she shut it again with a sigh of sheer relief, her heart lighter than it had been all day. She stood for a moment in a freezing huddle, water dripping steadily from her sodden cloak. Damn Camphis anyway.

Her feet carried her swiftly through the front hall and to the base of the stairs, where she paused thoughtfully. Leaning blindly down, without the nerve to make a magelight even here, she removed her boots and proceeded quietly, step by step. She could no longer feel the air in front of her for obstacles, as she had been, but instead clutched the heavy boots and turned her head constantly for the slightest glimmer of light. This house was like her own, and she knew it as she knew her own skin.

Maerad still proceeded with the utmost caution, however. She could never live down the humiliation of her late entrance, chilled to the bone and soaked in mud to her waist. No one need know how terribly her date had gone– no one need be any the wiser that, in her pride, she had walked the entire 3 hours from Tinagel to Innail under a pelting rain. _Damn_ Camphis. She was freezing. She would never date again.

Two more corridors to go until the haven of her bedroom, and she heard a sound. Instantly, she stopped moving, one foot placed forward but without pressure. It sounded almost like… a _door_. A door had swished a few spans from her face, stirring a little eddy of warm air.

Had it closed…? Had it opened…? Was someone–

Barely daring to breathe, Maerad altered her course somewhat in the dark, angling toward the far wall away from the door's immediate vicinity. Just in case– it may have just been a stray breeze, but if it had been pushed by a person…. by the Light, if it were _him_…

She all but pressed her body to the wall and moved with all the unseeing haste she could muster. Her boots weighed on her arms heavily, but she stubbornly clutched them.

And so it was that she didn't anticipate the chair blocking her new path, and didn't fling out her arms to catch herself. And there was a great thud, echoing from floor to ceiling, and Maerad flinched horribly even as she started to fall, arcing down, down, toward a certain, agonizingly loud crash.

Surely, the whole household would now awaken…

Surely… _he_ would be hearing….

Except Maerad did not fall.

As her body plummeted toward the hard wooden slatting beneath her feet, disembodied arms caught her and her trajectory was abruptly halted.

Still her thoughts roared in her ears…

_Please don't let him wake– please, anyone but Cadv–_

A magelight bloomed before her eyes and she found herself looking up into the pale, sleep-tousled, and confused face of Cadvan of Lirigon.

He said nothing for a long moment as his brain caught up with the strangeness of the situation, his eyes moving slowly over her dripping hair, mud-splattered cloak, and the darkness of the School street through the shadowy window behind them.

Maerad had stilled utterly. Her heart pounded against her ribs with almost embarrassing force. She stared fixedly at a spot to the left of his head.

She had time to count to twenty before he spoke, and then his words took her off guard, steeled as she was for scornful accusations, derisive laughter.

"What _time_ is it?"

She reeled at the unexpectedness. She began in what she hoped was a smooth, even tone. "Pretty early, Cadvan, I was just coming back from a garden walk with Camphis, you know…"

As if to spite her, the pitch of the wind suddenly rose to a ferocious howl and a branch thwacked across the window pane. Rain poured steadily down.

"A…walk…" Cadvan frowned.

Her legs were jelly, but she managed to shuffle half a dozen paces away, edging toward her room. She thought perhaps now would be a good time to deflect the topic, before he regained full consciousness. She had rarely seen him so honestly bewildered as now, willing a magelight into being before her horrified face and looking upon she who had fallen on him in the darkness.

"What are _you_ doing sneaking around the house?" she said icily. The tactic failed, and the sharpness of her voice seemed to rouse him. Cadvan shook his head doggishly, and the sleepy haze was slowly banished from his eyes, leaving him suddenly alarmingly present. His eyes darkened as he drew his own conclusions.

He took a step toward her, causing an embarrassing squeak of alarm to leave her lips.

"Maerad."

She retreated as he took another step, slowly. Measuredly.

"It is clearly near dawn, by the Light."

Step. Step.

His voice was pitched low, and she shivered.

"You are covered in mud."

He was a bare foot away from her and she realized she had backed into a wall. Her eyes darted from side to side, vainly.

"Will it be necessary for me to speak with Camphis directly about propriety and how one treats a woman with whom one goes on a romantic outing? Or would you like to tell me yourself what happened?"

The fiercely protective glint in his eye and the dangerous tone made her swallow. She would not for all the world be in Camphis's place the day Cadvan chose to confront him over her welfare.

And yet…

"Camphis offered to bring me back," she said reluctantly, the words dragged out of her. "But… we argued… he was so unbearable… I am an ordinary Bard now, a human being, not the Fated One…" Suddenly she needed to unburden herself, the gates to her angry disappointment about the failed evening crashing open in a bitter flood. She felt her cheeks flush with the force of her passion. "I just wanted one night, Cadvan, one night! Camphis… We had such fun speaking during Gis classes…. I thought he might… But he didn't see me, no one sees _me_."

And then he was so close she could feel his breath on her face, warm and infused with that spicy scent she remembered so well from their travels, in another lifetime. He of all people, she knew, understood. She resisted burying her head against his shoulder and instead held herself still, her pride flaming. Admitting weakness had never been easy.

However, Cadvan's eyes finally softened. "My dear," he murmured. "You are mistaken."

Either the rising gale outside had shockingly abated, or her ears were ringing undetectably at the sudden shift in mood. Maerad found perturbingly that she could not look away from that face, that face that she knew better than her own. The whiplashes stood out starkly in the weird glow of the magelight and his mouth was shadowed, so that it drew her gaze. Yet it was his eyes, blue, deep blue, and so profoundly warm that she felt an answering heat run down her skin, that held her as though a mouse in an ermine's magnetic grip. She at last threw off the last vestiges of shivering from the clinging mud and faced him squarely. It was as though the electricity from the clouds had invaded the corridor instead, invisible and pervasive.

He stood unmoved, inches from her, yet the space seemed smaller from the intensity linking them. Maerad felt as though she were being scried, laid open and raw to the bare winds, but no magery glowed about Cadvan's form. Her breathing wavered, though she did not look away.

And then she thought perhaps he _was_ closer than before. His eyes positively blazed. And though it was insanity, what was _wrong_ with her, her eyes left his, just for a second, to rest on his mouth. She could feel the warmth emanating from his hand as he raised it as though in a trance and cupped her chin, stroking her cheek with his thumb. His skin was warmer than hers, and rougher.

He was so close… his clothing brushed hers…

His body was nearly flush against her, flat to the wall, when suddenly, finally, as though having lost a silent battle, he closed his eyes and lowered his head to hers.

And her mind was buzzing, her blood singing through her veins with a wild, alarmed joy that was like liquid fire, when another door snapped open and, shocked, they leapt apart.

Cadvan's lips had been but a hairsbreadth from her own, and she felt the absence of his proximity like a physical blow. Her skin instantly chilled as she spun in the damnable door's direction. Cadvan, too, was peering through the dimness with something akin to rage, though his face was deceptively blank and his movements calculated.

Moments later, Malgorn was stumbling blearily into the magelight's circle, blinking.

"Why, greetings, Maerad, Cadvan…. It's a thirsty night with all this storming, think you not?" He squinted more closely at Maerad as he passed, and paused. "But how came you to be so entirely covered with mud, Maerad?"

"I… fell," she mumbled after a dense silence. "I was, er, walking. In the moonlight."

He seemed to remember that she had had an appointment earlier and brightened. "Oh, how was your date with Camphis?" She cursed his chattiness, not daring to look at Cadvan but feeling the nearness of him with every fiber of her being.

Despite herself, she cringed at the question, and kicked herself mentally. She tried to summon up what she thought was a cheery expression, and raised the corners of her mouth into a painful smile with an effort of will.

"It was wonderful!" she enthused. "He was wonderful! It was really w–" Cadvan unobtrusively nudged her foot.

Malgorn, not noticing, but somehow beginning to perceive the tension laid thickly between them, frowned. He narrowed his eyes at Cadvan, who stared determinately at a ceiling beam, and then swiftly back at Maerad.

"Wonderful, you say," he repeated suspiciously.

She pushed her lips up even farther until the grin was cramping her cheeks.

There was then a moment in which Malgorn clearly wanted to say more, opening and closing his mouth several times, and didn't. Instead, after a ferocious banging on the window by the wind, and with an expansive sigh, Malgorn shook his head and slowly resumed his march to the kitchens.

"I'm glad it was wonderful, Maerad," he called over his retreating back. "You will have to tell Silvia all about it in the morning."

They listened to his retreating footsteps until, two flights down, they were no longer audible to normal hearing. Only then did Maerad glance up at Cadvan, unsure what she expected, or hoped, to find in his face. He stared at her unreadably.

She said in a small voice, "Do you think he believed me?" The sound died almost instantly in the silent hall.

And then the tension broke with a tangible snap and Cadvan smiled, brilliantly.

"Oh, no doubt," he said. "That was quite the performance."

He took her hand and led her the few paces– it had been so close!– to her room, where he opened the door and then stepped back, still with the irrepressible brilliance of his joy sparkling from every feature.

"My Lady," he said humorously, bowing. She wished fiercely that his earlier dark, burning mood would return, and then wondered at herself and almost slapped her own face. She entered the doorway and then turned to look back, searching. Her nails dug into her palms.

"Until tomorrow, Maerad."

And it was there, barely concealed beneath the surface. Lightly dusted over as it was with mirth and understanding, the feeling was there.

And she couldn't even guess what her face showed or her movements reflected, but the answering rush of happiness that flooded her being left her almost shaking.

"Until tomorrow, Cadvan."


End file.
